Thousands of users complained about issues, citing problems with sharing posts and sending messages
For many attempting to share Thanksgiving posts on Facebook on Thursday morning, it seemed the social network was not in the holiday mood.
Thousands of users complained about issues with Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram, citing problems with sharing posts and sending messages, according to Down Detector, a website that tracks such outages.
Continue reading...‘Final straw’ was refusal to allow partner to mark dubious claims by far-right parties
Facebook’s only Dutch factchecker has quit over the social network’s refusal to allow them to highlight political lies as being false.
The online newspaper Nu.nl had been Facebook’s only factchecking partner in the Netherlands since Leiden University dropped out of the programme last year. The website had sole responsibility for marking Facebook and Instagram news content for Dutch users as being false or misleading, in order to help power the social network’s tools that suppress distribution of misinformation.
Continue reading...In wide-ranging speech, actor accuses tech giants of running the ‘greatest propaganda machine in history’
Read Sacha Baron Cohen’s scathing attack on Facebook in full
Sacha Baron Cohen has denounced tech giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google as “the greatest propaganda machine in history” and culpable for a surge in “murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities”.
Baron Cohen was speaking on Thursday at Never Is Now, the Anti-Defamation League’s summit on antisemitism and hate in New York, where he was presented with the organisation’s international leadership award. He said that “hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities” and that “all this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history”.
Continue reading...Former US secretary of state concerned that female MPs cited online threats
Online threats which intimidate people into standing down as MPs are “the path to authoritarianism [and] fascism”, Hillary Clinton has said.
Speaking to an audience in London, Clinton said she took “very seriously” the fact that significant numbers of female MPs had opted not to run again for parliament in the coming election, in many cases citing online intimidation and threats against their safety.
Continue reading...The company’s new logo is designed to bring a ‘sense of optimism’ to the brand that brought us the Cambridge Analytica scandal
Forget Facebook: meet FACEBOOK.
Amid antitrust investigations, Capitol Hill hearings, and a generally poor reputation, the company announced on Monday it is reinventing itself with a rebrand. In the coming weeks, a new multicolored, all-caps logo will begin appearing across its services. Instagram and Whatsapp, owned by the company, will proudly tell users that they are services “from FACEBOOK”.
Continue reading...Former presidential candidate criticises Facebook’s decision to let politicians lie in adverts
Mark Zuckerberg “should pay a price” for what he is doing to democracy, Hillary Clinton has said, as she expressed doubts about whether free and fair elections were even possible in the wake of Facebook’s decision to not factcheck political advertising.
Speaking in New York at a screening of The Great Hack, a Netflix documentary about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate cited the threat to upcoming elections in both the US and UK as she made the damning remarks about Facebook’s decision to allow politicians to lie in adverts posted to its platform.
Continue reading...Activists speak out after being warned of alleged cyber-attack to infiltrate mobile phones
More than a dozen pro-democracy activists, journalists and academics have spoken out after WhatsApp privately warned them they had allegedly been the victims of cyber-attacks designed to secretly infiltrate their mobile phones.
The individuals received alerts saying they were among more than 100 human rights campaigners whose phones were believed to have been hacked using malware sold by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberweapons company.
Continue reading...Social network’s move comes as Facebook faces controversy over ads that promote misinformation
Twitter will ban all political advertising, the company’s CEO has announced, in a move that will increase pressure on Facebook over its controversial stance to allow politicians to advertise false statements.
The new policy, announced via Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account on Wednesday, will come into effect on 22 November and will apply globally to all electioneering ads, as well as ads related to political issues. The timing means the ban will be in place in time for the UK snap election.
Continue reading...Fake networks in eight nations are connected to man allegedly behind disinformation empire
Facebook has taken down accounts linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin – the businessman allegedly behind Russia’s notorious troll factory – which were actively seeking to influence the domestic politics of a range of African countries.
The company said on Wednesday it had suspended three networks of “inauthentic” Russian accounts. The Facebook pages targeted eight countries across the continent: Madagascar, the Central African Republic (CAR), Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Sudan and Libya.
Continue reading...NSO Group’s spyware allegedly used in cyber-attacks on lawyers and journalists
WhatsApp has launched an unprecedented lawsuit against a cyber weapons firm which it has accused of being behind secret attacks on more than 100 human rights activists, lawyers, journalists, and academics in just two weeks earlier this year.
The social media firm is suing NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance company, saying it is responsible for a series of highly sophisticated cyber-attacks which it claims violated American law in an “unmistakeable pattern of abuse”.
Continue reading...Commissioner says ‘still some way to go’ in battle against disinformation on social media
Facebook and other major social media platforms have been accused by the European commission of giving a misleading picture of their efforts to remove fake accounts spreading politically motivated disinformation.
The security commissioner, Julian King, told the Guardian on the publication of the sites’ self-assessment reports to the EU’s executive that there remained a “disconnect” between the claims of progress from social media companies and “the lived experience”.
Continue reading...Mark Zuckerberg faced a gruelling examination from the Democratic lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday, with questions over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook’s reluctance to police political advertising.
The Facebook CEO declined to disclose when he found out the company was harvesting and selling user data to influence elections. She also asked Zuckerberg about his 'dinner parties with far-right figures' and if at those meetings he addressed the popular rightwing theory that Facebook cracks down on conservative speech, a question Zuckerberg also dodged
Democratic lawmaker challenges Facebook CEO during hearing over Libra cryptocurrency
Mark Zuckerberg faced a grueling examination from the Democratic lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday, with questions over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook’s reluctance to police political advertising.
Ocasio-Cortez and other lawmakers grilled the Facebook CEO during a hearing in front of the US House of Representatives financial services committee regarding the launch of Facebook’s cryptocurrency project, Libra.
Continue reading...The company confirmed it had dismantled the four accounts and announced initiatives to prevent foreign interference in US campaigns
Facebook on Monday disclosed it had taken down four new foreign interference operations originating from Iran and Russia, including one targeting the US 2020 presidential elections that appears to be linked to the Russian troll agency, the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
The suspected IRA campaign “had the hallmarks of a well-resourced operation that took consistent operational security steps to conceal their identity and location”, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said in a blogpost.
Continue reading...The presidential hopeful and Mark Zuckerberg are facing off over big tech and its influence over our lives
More than two hours into the Democratic debate in Ohio on Tuesday night, after discussions on healthcare, gun control and foreign policy, the moderators turned to another issue that sharply divided the candidates: is it time to break up Facebook?
The question was framed slightly differently: is Elizabeth Warren right?
Continue reading...Ad claims CEO backs Trump – then admits it’s not true – after company admits letting politicians make false statements
Facebook has been taking heat all week for its decision to allow politicians to make false statements in paid advertisements. Now the Democratic senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is taking the fight to the social media company’s own turf by taking out a series of Facebook ads that make false statements about Facebook and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
“Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election,” the ads read, above a photograph of a recent Oval Office meeting between the billionaire tech executive and the president.
Continue reading...Several large companies have announced their departure, including Visa and Mastercard, a week after PayPal exited
Nearly every payment firm that initially agreed to join Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra has backed out, in a potentially fatal blow to the social network’s plan for a worldwide digital currency.
Visa and Mastercard said on Friday they would no longer participate in the Libra Association and Latin American payment system Mercado Pago announced it would back out as well. Several other large companies have announced their departures .
Continue reading...Profits on social media app surged by more than 50% to £797m in latest tax year
Facebook’s UK operations paid £28m in tax last year despite attracting a record £1.6bn in British sales.
The social media company’s latest UK accounts show that gross income from advertisers rose almost 30% last year to £1.65bn, and pretax profits surged by more than 50% from £63m to £97m.
Continue reading...Leaked recordings published by the Verge show Zuckerberg fears ‘existential threat’ if Democratic contender becomes president
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said his company will “go to the mat” if Elizabeth Warren is elected president and seeks to fulfil her promise to break up America’s tech giants.
Related: Trump impeachment: public support grows as scandal widens – live news
Continue reading...Social media giant said the move was backed by anti-bullying and mental health groups
Some Facebook users will soon no longer see the number of likes, reactions and video views on other’s posts in a world-first trial aimed at boosting users’ wellbeing.
Instead, likes will be private and only visible to the post’s author in a change that follows a similar test on Instagram which started in July in Australia. The new Facebook trial, which begins on Friday, will also kick off in Australia.
Continue reading...